Marilyn Crispell has been a composer and performer of contemporary improvised music since 1978. For ten years, she was a member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet and the Reggie Workman Ensemble, has been a member of Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry since 2018, and has performed and recorded extensively as a soloist and with players on the American and international jazz scene, also working with dancers, poets, film-makers and visual artists, and teaching workshops in improvisation. She has been the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship grants, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust composition commission and recipient of a 2025 NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship award, an Instant Award in Improvised Music (Berlin, Germany), and a 2026 Jazz Foundation of America/Mellon Foundation Jazz Legacy Award.

Jason Stein is an internationally recognized bass clarinetist and composer and is among the handful of jazz musicians who play the bass clarinet exclusively. Stein leads the acclaimed trio Locksmith Isidore as well as his own quartet, and he is an indispensable contributor to several of the leading bands on Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene. Stein has been named on both the Downbeat Critics Poll and the El Intruso International Critics Poll, having won the latter from 2017-2020. Stein’s playing showcases an extraordinary expertise on the bass clarinet, ranging from powerful post-bop lines to ear-grabbing wails in the altissimo range. Stein is based in Chicago and has recorded for such labels as Leo, Delmark, Not Two, Atavistic, 482 Music, Clean Feed, Astral Spirits, Sunnyside, Eremite, and Northern Spy.

Damon Smith studied double bass with Lisle Ellis and has had lessons with Bertram Turezky, Joëlle Leandré, John Lindberg, Mark Dresser and others. Damon’s explorations into the sonic palette of the double bass have resulted in a personal, flexible improvisational language based in the American jazz avant-garde movement and European non-idiomatic free improvisation. Visual art, film and dance heavily influence his music, as evidenced by his CAMH performance of Ben Patterson’s Variations for Double Bass, collaborations with director Werner Herzog on soundtracks for Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, and an early performance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Anna Webber (b. 1984) is a flutist, saxophonist, and composer whose interests and work live in the aesthetic overlap between avant-garde jazz and new classical music. Her music has been called "visionary and captivating," (Wall Street Journal), and “heady music [that] appeals to the rest of the body” (NPR). In 2024 alone, she received the Herb Albert Award in the Arts, a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works commission, and was voted top of both the tenor saxophone and flute “Rising Star” categories in the Downbeat Critic’s Poll. She was additionally voted top of the Downbeat “Rising Star” arranger category in 2025.

A prolific bandleader, Webber is known for her group Simple Trio (with John Hollenbeck on drums and Matt Mitchell on piano), with which she’s worked since 2013 and has released 4 albums; the Webber MorrisBig Band, a group she co-leads with saxophonist and composer Angela Morris; and her quintet Shimmer Wince.

Smith was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ten Freedom Summers,(Defining Moments in the History of the United States of America), a collection of compositions inspired by the civil rights movement and released as a 4-CD boxed set. Ten Freedom Summers has also been awarded a MAP Fund Award (2011), Chamber Music America New Works Grant (2010), National Endowment for the Arts Recording Grant (2010), Southwest Chamber Music commission with support from the James Irvine Foundation and Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009-2010). Smith was named DownBeat Magazine’s Composer of the Year in 2013. In 2016 Smith received a Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. In addition, he received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement, “honoring brilliance and resilience.”

Pianist/Composer/Educator Angelica Sanchez moved to New York from Arizona in 1994. Since moving to the East Coast Sanchez has collaborated with such notable artists as Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Motian, Richard Davis, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, Tim Berne, Mario Pavone, Ben Monder amongst others. Sanchez leads numerous groups, the most recent being her Trio which features Michael Formanek and Billy Hart.

Her music has been recognized in national and international publications including Jazz Times, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune amongst others. She was also the 2008 recipient of a French/American Chamber Music America grant, the 2011, 2024 Rockefeller Brothers Pocantico artist residency, and the 2022 Civitella Fellowship, Italy. 

Molly Jones’ practice incorporates improvisation, composition, and multimedia performance with saxophones, flutes, and electronic samples.  Her work originates in a place of playfulness, listening, and attention.

Formed by her experiences in jazz, classical, Balkan brass, and Scottish country dance/contradance ensembles, and by her fascination with found sounds, she has created chamber works, graphic scores, electroacoustic pieces, experimental theater works, and video installations, in addition to maintaining an active improvisational practice.  She performs with Chicago improvising quartet Mad Myth Science.Her 2017 free jazz album Microliths was nominated for Debut Album of 2017 in NPR’s Jazz Critics’ Poll, and she was nominated for a 2020 Detroit Music Award.  Her poetry can be found in Saul Williams’ Chorus: A Literary Mixtape and Matchbox Magazine.  She works as a software engineer and is currently developing a neural network instrument and maintaining a found-sound recording practice

Josh Harlow is a pianist and composer in Chicago who expresses a creative and luminous energy.Josh’s influences include Thelonious Monk, Bjork, Lake Michigan, friends, and family. Current projects include the liberation music project Teiku, the toy instrument exploration microplastique, and the monthly Tangible Music series in the Bridgeport neighborhood. Josh has performed or recorded with Wadada Leo Smith, Vincent Davis, Jaribu Shahid, John Lindberg, Michael Formanek, and many other inspirations of all generations and styles. Josh has performed across the US, including renowned festivals: Edgefest, the Chicago Jazz Festival, Amalgam Festival.

Ben Zucker is an experimental composer and performer, interested in music’s unique capacities to model systems of change through a rigorous, dynamic play of contemplation and visceral immersion in sonic extremes. Starting from a background in jazz and theater, this speculation now regularly mixes in explorations of philosophy, improvisation, ambience, alternative notations, juxtapositions, and protocols. His practice includes “stirring compositions…built on a lifetime of musical curiosity” (Chicago Reader), and performances on vibraphone, brass, keys, voice, and electronics across styles. This intentionally diverse practice has included highlights such as compositions featured at the Berlin Philharmonie, London Roundhouse, and in PBS documentaries, residencies with OneBeat and the Stockholm EMS, and collaborations with groundbreaking musical figures ranging from Anthony Braxton to Sudan Archives. Deeply invested in the structural elements of musical life, their career has also involved extensive engagement with labor organizing, education, and project management. He lives in Chicago, working as a freelance artist, lecturer at Roosevelt University, President of New Music Chicago, and curator for Elastic Arts’ Improvised Music Series. 

Keefe Jackson, saxophonist/clarinetist/improvisor/composer, arrived in Chicago in 2001 from his native Fayettevile, Arkansas. He performs regularly in the U.S. and in Europe with many musicians including Pandelis Karayorgis, Tomeka Reid, Tim Daisy, Dave Rempis, Jeb Bishop, Jason Roebke, Jason Adasiewicz, Mike Reed, Jason Stein, Josh Berman, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Frank Rosaly, Oscar Jan Hoogland and Marc Unternaehrer. He has also appeared with Michael Moore, Ab Baars, Michiel Braam, Satoko Fujii, and Anthony Coleman. Bill Meyer (Chicago Reader): "...the impeccable logic of his lines and the richness of his tone leave you wanting more... Jackson's high-register squiggles and coarsely voiced, rippling runs push the limits of the tenor's tonal envelope." Frank van Herk, de Volkskrant (Amsterdam): "[Jackson] has an old-fashioned, warm-woolly sound, and a feeling for melodic lines that take their time in unfolding." He has been mentioned in the DownBeat Critics Poll in the Rising Star Tenor Saxophone category. Recordings are available on Delmark and Clean Feed Records.

Born 1995 in Madison, Wisconsin, Jakob Heinemann is a multidisciplinary artist, working in the areas of sound art, free improvisation, avant garde composition, photography and acoustic ecology.

Much of my work centers on sonic communion as a means of cultural exchange and solidarity, using sound to understand the community and environments we inhabit as well as our relationships therein.

A double bass player, I am deeply committed to improvisation, with roots in the free jazz community of Chicago, and I play in outsider Americana trio Alta Vista and the avant-jazz Devin Drobka Trio.

My compositions tend to reflect this spirit of collaboration. They frequently utilize open scoring to create a participatory framework inclusive of both performer and composer, as well as field recordings and spectral analysis to document a sense of place in a radically changing environment. I currently reside in Los Angeles, where I am pursuing an MFA in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices at California Institute of the Arts.

Chicago-based percussionist, composer, and improviser working across free jazz, experimental composition, and interdisciplinary performance. Known for his leadership of microplastique, the Adiaphora Orchestra, and the Stein/Smith/Shead trio, as well as collaborations with Marilyn Crispell, Shead is an active figure in Chicago’s contemporary creative music community as both performer and curator.